I'm sure that the answer to this should be blindingly obvious but....*it's not to me* so....
I've been reasonably successful loading SuSe 7.3, 8.0 and 8.2 on a variety of boxes over the last couple of years. I've upgraded my distro out of curiosity and tend to use the latest version on installs - I now have 7 SuSe boxes at home and work. They mainly run 8.2 - except where I had problems with two TFT monitors and 8.0 seemed to load more smoothly.
I will continue to load 8.2 as a first choice (yes yes yes - one day I'll try Slack and Mandrake and Debian and Gentoo :-))- unless I am convinced otherwise. Is there any reason that I should install early versions of a distro if I am converting an older box to Linux use? I currently have a K2 333 (?) with 96mb and I want to use it as a web server for a simple site (and perhaps a mailserver) - do I need to try to select a distro version that matches the age of the box or do distros always cater to "the past" ? I'm looking to set up another box of similar specs as a simple web-browser cum email box.
I ask this question because I've been forced to touch with XP lately and I got to wondering how I would deal with this setup if I was using W$. I'm sure I could dig out a copy of W95!!
Cheers
Stephen

"Is there any reason that I should install early versions of a distro if I am converting an older box to Linux use?"

Well, in the case of SuSE, 8.2 and 8.1 are set up to be used with i586 or higher processor architectures IIRC. So if you want to install SuSE on a system that uses i486 or lower, you'd want to use 8.0 or older.

just one word:
NEVER touch a running system ! If you have a good distro and you are happy with it - why use a new one with different settings/setups ?
In the heat of battle, I prefer to deal with as little differences as possible, when administering my systems. The variety of versions present on the systems I'm responsible for, increases the pain when time is come to close some open doors.
BTW older boxes run fine with older software, but not necessarily with newer one.

So on the AMD K2-266 that I want to use as a webserver, would I be better off with Suse 8.0 or 7.3? I seem to be having problems with 8.0 with the graphic/monitor setup.

Id run Slackware or Debian. They are much lighter, and more suited for servers, especially on older systems.

You could run the latest version of those distros on that K6.

Just one more question - I'll be ssh -ing into the server. I still need to use graphical tools eg webmin for admin. Does X have to be on the server to ssh into webmin? Currently, I ssh between several boxes and they all have the X environment. If webmin is installed on the server, can I do without X and use X on the ssh client? I hope I've expressed that clearly :-)

No - I don't need X for webmin. Webmin is accessed through a browser. Webin is therefore some kind of server. Therefore I can address set up issues and access webmin without X.
Wow.
I think I've finally answered one of my own questions.